Good friend of mine (very caucasian) has a two year old daughter he affectionately calls his 'little bean.' We met up with a mexican friend of ours we hadn't seen in a couple years, and the dad introduced her as his 'frijolita'. Our friend grinned and said, 'I know you didn't mean anything by that, but you'd really be better off if you never call her that in public. ' The dad's face, as it morphed from total puzzlement to understanding of how that might be taken was pretty hilarious.

A few years back I read Mark Twain's Roughing It, about his stage coach journey out west as a teenager. Twain would likely, at the time, be considered pretty fair-minded, but at one point he casually refers to the Mexican staff at a coach stop as "beaners."

So a friend of mine whom I went to college with just let me know about this personal project of hers that brings people constant news on The Sun. It's movements, emissions and even breakthroughs being made in to Solar Energy. She wants to set up a site for it but in the meantime she's started this facebook page. I really suggest you check it out.

RSS readers take raw feeds of data—headline, text, timestamp, etc.—and display that information in a stripped-down interface along with many other feeds, which is what makes them so efficient. (Here is the RSS feed for Quartz.) Less obvious is how many RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked.

And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader. Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. YouTube, by contrast, is easier to censor, though it is also owned by Google, because the video site is located on its own domain, youtube.com. Reader is also harder, though not impossible, to block because it uses more secure technology known as HTTPS.

@Wood, when Google Reader discontinued their social function there was a HUGE backlash because of this exact reason. People in Iran and other countries with oppressive regimes and internet censorship were using Google Reader as a social networking tool that enabled them to speak freely.

It made my friends' (and my) complaints about losing the ability to post comments on inane design articles we were sharing seem ... pretty trivial. It's an enormous bummer that they discontinued social, and even more of a bummer that the service is disappearing altogether.

Surely that's no good, though? If the RSS reader is part of your browser, your machine will still be accessing the censored sites. You need the work to be being done on a server at an inconvenient-to-block address.